One or more aspects of the present invention relate to application fault handling and, more specifically, to maintaining core dump privacy during application fault handling.
When a software application has a failure, memory dump files are commonly created in order to provide first failure diagnostic data capture for fault handling. The memory dump may then be used with powerful tooling to provide vital capabilities for investigating, analyzing and resolving the failure. This is possible because the memory dump contains the complete state of the software application at the point of failure, including all of the data that the application is acting on.
These dumps are therefore commonly transferred to systems administrators and developers for analysis. The dumps may also be required to be sent to software vendors in order to investigate the cause of any failure.
This however provides an exposure of potentially confidential data in the memory dump. Even data that is stored in an encrypted format may exist in a non-encrypted form in the memory dump as the software application has to decrypt the data in order to act upon it.
As a result there is a need to ensure that potentially confidential information can be removed from a memory dump, while retaining the ability to use the memory dump to diagnose the cause of software failures.